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Voices of the Nakba: A Living History of Palestine
***Winner of an English PEN Award 2021*** During the 1948 war more than 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were violently expelled from their homes by Zionist militias. The legacy of the Nakba - which translates to ‘disaster’ or ‘catastrophe’ - lays bare the violence of the ongoing Palestinian plight.
Voices of the Nakba collects the stories of first-generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, documenting a watershed moment in the history of the modern Middle East through the voices of the people who lived through it.
The interviews, with commentary from leading scholars of Palestine and the Middle East, offer a vivid journey into the history, politics and culture of Palestine, defining Palestinian popular memory on its own terms in all its plurality and complexity.
Voices of the Nakba collects the stories of first-generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, documenting a watershed moment in the history of the modern Middle East through the voices of the people who lived through it.
The interviews, with commentary from leading scholars of Palestine and the Middle East, offer a vivid journey into the history, politics and culture of Palestine, defining Palestinian popular memory on its own terms in all its plurality and complexity.
368 pages, Paperback
First published September 20, 2021
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2129 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
April 27, 2024
I do not like reading about or learning about “history”. I get bored and can’t identify with it so for me to recommend this book is a big deal. The structure of the book is excellent because at the beginning of each chapter is an expository analysis of what the subsequent stories/interviews will be. This allowed me to digest the info twice and in different ways which helped me understand the material better.
Main takeaways: what Israel is doing today is not new. They did this to Palestinians time and time again historically. They are working out of a play book.
They way they attack the Palestinians and then push them out and take over their homes is identical to what they are doing now. The Zionist Jews terrorized Palestinians. Period.
It’s just massacre upon massacre upon massacre.
Basically the creation of Israel is just an extension of Western imperialism and it’s disgusting. Folks are brainwashed and not allowed to know the truth because that would disrupt the colonial plans.
Everyone needs to read this.
Main takeaways: what Israel is doing today is not new. They did this to Palestinians time and time again historically. They are working out of a play book.
They way they attack the Palestinians and then push them out and take over their homes is identical to what they are doing now. The Zionist Jews terrorized Palestinians. Period.
It’s just massacre upon massacre upon massacre.
Basically the creation of Israel is just an extension of Western imperialism and it’s disgusting. Folks are brainwashed and not allowed to know the truth because that would disrupt the colonial plans.
Everyone needs to read this.
July 22, 2022
the best thing to do w this book is really take your time with it and fully absorb the history being shared straight from Palestinians. for arabic speakers, following along the interview transcript with the video on the POHA archives are also must do. It makes you feel just a little bit closer to Palestine and our ancestors who lived there and were subsequently exiled.
January 15, 2024
‘In 2012, during one of the last interviews I filmed for the Nakba Archive,
a man in his nineties from the village of Taytaba, then living in Burj al-Bara-jneh camp in Beirut, concluded by telling Mahmoud and I that he had little
expectation of seeing his village again. ‘I don’t have hope to return,’ he said,
matter of factly. ‘Palestinians from 1948 will die here. We dream in Pales-tine – we remember our villages and return to them in our dreams – but
one day this too may not be permitted.’’
the pain articulated in this collection is astounding. I would love to learn Arabic and will have to revisit this if I ever do and follow along with the accompanying videos. amazing book
a man in his nineties from the village of Taytaba, then living in Burj al-Bara-jneh camp in Beirut, concluded by telling Mahmoud and I that he had little
expectation of seeing his village again. ‘I don’t have hope to return,’ he said,
matter of factly. ‘Palestinians from 1948 will die here. We dream in Pales-tine – we remember our villages and return to them in our dreams – but
one day this too may not be permitted.’’
the pain articulated in this collection is astounding. I would love to learn Arabic and will have to revisit this if I ever do and follow along with the accompanying videos. amazing book
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February 13, 2024“History is merciless... I do not fear for my life, I am 79 years old and I have lived long enough. My wish is to be a martyr.”
“Based on new information available since 2003, we can now say that no less than 100 massacres were committed in Palestinian towns and villages that were occupied and whose inhabitants were forced to flee. This means that, on average, a massacre was committed in one in every five villages whose residents were displaced. The proportion could have been as high as one in three or one in two if one considers that the only reason dozens of villages did not witness a massacre is that their inhabitants had already fled in terror before the Israeli forces arrived.”
“Based on new information available since 2003, we can now say that no less than 100 massacres were committed in Palestinian towns and villages that were occupied and whose inhabitants were forced to flee. This means that, on average, a massacre was committed in one in every five villages whose residents were displaced. The proportion could have been as high as one in three or one in two if one considers that the only reason dozens of villages did not witness a massacre is that their inhabitants had already fled in terror before the Israeli forces arrived.”
July 2, 2025
"Hamda can tell stories of the Nakba, but she cannot be its witness."
November 20, 2024
“This is history, and history is merciless!”
This book not only does a fantastic job in documenting the oral histories of Palestinians who lived through the 1948 Nakba, but also is amazing at bringing life to the region of Palestine, with the contributors painting their lives before their expulsion so vividly that you can visualise and plsce yourself into the country, which is equally important in the legitimisation of the Palestinian people and the State of Palestine.
This book not only does a fantastic job in documenting the oral histories of Palestinians who lived through the 1948 Nakba, but also is amazing at bringing life to the region of Palestine, with the contributors painting their lives before their expulsion so vividly that you can visualise and plsce yourself into the country, which is equally important in the legitimisation of the Palestinian people and the State of Palestine.
March 12, 2023
I was looking forward to reading this collection as I had the privilige to work with various fascinating oral accounts during my time at university and grapple with some of the theory, meanings, and challenges of oral sources (as well as their importance and centrality to peasant lives) that some of these chapters illuminate. Cynthia Kreichati, while introducing Fatima Sha 'ban's account in chapter 13, explicitely addresses such issues:
Indeed, such dominant narratives are often near-impossible to escape from regardless of how groundless they may be (try asking a British person about Churchill or the British empire). Historians of the Nakba have an even greater uphill battle. Oral histories were neglected until the 90s - around 50 years after 1948, on which the carefully planned series of massacres (in at least 530 villages) and ethnic cleansing (towns would be surrounded on three sides and then bombed to turn its inhabitants into refugees and funnel them out of the country) marks the start of the Nakba for many. It is hard to fathom how much knowledge has been lost in that time. Isreal has banned reference to the Nakba, built statues to its soldiers and to the Holocaust over sites of the massacres to erase their history, and weaponises international Holocaust education to silence critics (a reality I've had frustrating encounters with as a history teacher). UN refugee camps similarly refused to teach refugees their own history. Survivors, loaded with trauma and scars and guilt, often let silence settle over their memories rather than pass them on to their children. Many younger Palestinians blame elders for fleeing their country, for not fighting harder, and this shines through in some of the oral testimony. One interview (Badawi camp, North Lebanon, 2003) involved a young woman asking a then 75-year old man who had fought in the liberation army against the zionist soldiers whether he thought his retreat was a betrayal, and then asking him to recall "the massacres, the massacres!" when he demurs. Perhaps we should accept it as a reminder that for some, particularly younger Palestinians, the intimate personal memories of interviewees - sometimes messy and unorganised, sometimes listing carefully names of murdered friends and family, sometimes poetic, sometimes taciturn, sometimes skimming over traumatic events while savouring the taste of childhood memories and peaceful village life - is not a history they recognise or find empowerment in.
While this collection is a fascinating insight into oral history and memory in its own right, it is of course also a great tool for illuminating aspects of the lead up to 1948. The various injustices of the British Mandate of Palestine; the decision to faciliate the (often illegal and clandestine) smuggling of Jewish settlers into the country while propagandising it as empty land; the failure of the British state to then protect Palestinians from zionist terrorist groups (indeed, often British soldiers and police were warned of terror attacks in advance so they could turn a blind eye - and even when British officials were themselves targeted, the state declined from prosecuting zionist killers); the loudspeaker warnings and playing of screams over radio to scare away civilians; the lining up of young men to be murdered by firing squads, multiplied across hundreds of villages; the frequent refusal to allow surviving women and children to bury bodies; the blowing up of mosques where dead and injured civilians were brought, often after trapping other survivors inside; the placing of landmines to kill civilians; the use of trucks and buses to transport survivors out of the country to split families up and prevent resistance. The horrors stack up high, yet tragically still remain largely invisible to the west.
In summary, the accounts are well selected, the chapter introductions do a great job adding context, and the need for this sort of book remains ever-pressing (though thankfully oral histories of Palestine are growing fairly quickly in number now). For those interested in Palestinian/Nakba history, it also points to many other valuable sources of knowledge, such as the Palestinian Oral History Archives where you can see video testimony from elders (https://libraries.aub.edu.lb/poha/). The importance of the accessesibility of this sort of history is hard to over-estimate.
"The questions that haunt this essay concern not only the responsibility of listerners but also what a 'politics of listening' might reveal about Palestine and the Palestinian people. Oral history, as a mode of knowledge production, is resolutely engrained in social-historical contexts. Its risks are well known - misrepresentation (the archetype of the refugee, the othering of the suffering subject), salvage ethnography (the recording of histories and cultural practices percieved as vanishing), and the reification of the personal and intimate experience (where, for example, attempts at constructing collective narratives, linked to broader, more majoritarian concersn, are considered dogmatic or oppressive). However, as I have suggested, listening as a mode of attunement might allow us to both reflect on and transcend the limitations of dominant narratives"
Indeed, such dominant narratives are often near-impossible to escape from regardless of how groundless they may be (try asking a British person about Churchill or the British empire). Historians of the Nakba have an even greater uphill battle. Oral histories were neglected until the 90s - around 50 years after 1948, on which the carefully planned series of massacres (in at least 530 villages) and ethnic cleansing (towns would be surrounded on three sides and then bombed to turn its inhabitants into refugees and funnel them out of the country) marks the start of the Nakba for many. It is hard to fathom how much knowledge has been lost in that time. Isreal has banned reference to the Nakba, built statues to its soldiers and to the Holocaust over sites of the massacres to erase their history, and weaponises international Holocaust education to silence critics (a reality I've had frustrating encounters with as a history teacher). UN refugee camps similarly refused to teach refugees their own history. Survivors, loaded with trauma and scars and guilt, often let silence settle over their memories rather than pass them on to their children. Many younger Palestinians blame elders for fleeing their country, for not fighting harder, and this shines through in some of the oral testimony. One interview (Badawi camp, North Lebanon, 2003) involved a young woman asking a then 75-year old man who had fought in the liberation army against the zionist soldiers whether he thought his retreat was a betrayal, and then asking him to recall "the massacres, the massacres!" when he demurs. Perhaps we should accept it as a reminder that for some, particularly younger Palestinians, the intimate personal memories of interviewees - sometimes messy and unorganised, sometimes listing carefully names of murdered friends and family, sometimes poetic, sometimes taciturn, sometimes skimming over traumatic events while savouring the taste of childhood memories and peaceful village life - is not a history they recognise or find empowerment in.
While this collection is a fascinating insight into oral history and memory in its own right, it is of course also a great tool for illuminating aspects of the lead up to 1948. The various injustices of the British Mandate of Palestine; the decision to faciliate the (often illegal and clandestine) smuggling of Jewish settlers into the country while propagandising it as empty land; the failure of the British state to then protect Palestinians from zionist terrorist groups (indeed, often British soldiers and police were warned of terror attacks in advance so they could turn a blind eye - and even when British officials were themselves targeted, the state declined from prosecuting zionist killers); the loudspeaker warnings and playing of screams over radio to scare away civilians; the lining up of young men to be murdered by firing squads, multiplied across hundreds of villages; the frequent refusal to allow surviving women and children to bury bodies; the blowing up of mosques where dead and injured civilians were brought, often after trapping other survivors inside; the placing of landmines to kill civilians; the use of trucks and buses to transport survivors out of the country to split families up and prevent resistance. The horrors stack up high, yet tragically still remain largely invisible to the west.
In summary, the accounts are well selected, the chapter introductions do a great job adding context, and the need for this sort of book remains ever-pressing (though thankfully oral histories of Palestine are growing fairly quickly in number now). For those interested in Palestinian/Nakba history, it also points to many other valuable sources of knowledge, such as the Palestinian Oral History Archives where you can see video testimony from elders (https://libraries.aub.edu.lb/poha/). The importance of the accessesibility of this sort of history is hard to over-estimate.
September 11, 2023
Heartbreaking, true, historical testimonials. Shows just how the British mandate set everything up in the months leading to the great catastrophe cleansing.
Read
May 8, 2025“Hamda’s memories restore specific details of dress and costume, of kitchen utensils and home furniture, of machines, of the wheat and barley harvest, of the beauty of the eggplants and the tomatoes. She retraces the paths and byways she took to work, those where battles took place, and the roads and forests that witnessed her expulsion. She tells us how she could distinguish each and every piece of land and the people to whom it belonged. Describing these details, she underlines the value once ascribed to them - a value that now lies in their being lost and longed for, and which makes them the things that rise to the surface when life in Palestine is evoked.”
May 30, 2024
an incredibly important collection of oral history, recording the personal experiences and traumas of Palestinians displaced by the ongoing Nakba, specifically during 1936-1948. It makes visceral and intimate the horrors that each individual being interviewed endured while also taking into account how their gender, class, and religious identities shaped each of their often different experiences. The interviews are each prefaced by an academic analysis of how personal oral histories can be placed within the larger context of geopolitical history while highlighting their dichotomies.
Read
August 18, 2024around halfway and i fear that i am def not going to finish this before its due again and ive renewed already… but def recommend, really expansive collection of interviews that detail palestine before after and during the nakba.. my brain is tragically too fried currently with my diss to read more history on the top.. but i watched some of the vids of the interviews ive read which may be a more accessible way to engage in the project.. link is https://www.nakba-archive.org/ i believe
June 15, 2023
This is a rich book of oral history. It tells dozens of stories of people who lived through the Nakba, and are still living through it - in camps, or dreaming of their homes. The book comments on their transcripts with historical context, but also questions the type of history that has excluded these narratives as subjective and unreliable. I really recommend it!
January 11, 2026
“Nakba stories not only restore a vital human perspective to our understanding of the region, but also subvert imperialist hegemony over knowledge and teaching of Middle Eastern history.”
January 9, 2022
"It was the Syrian intellectual, Constantina Zurayk, who first coined the term, al-Nakba to describe the disaster that befell Palestinians and Arabs during the creation of the Israeli state in 1948" 1
Hamda's memories of pre-Nakba Palestine emerge as a network of entangled and overlapped fragments" 61
"The ongoing actuality of Palestinian tragedy entails not only the impossibility of curing trauma by narrating or forgetting, but also effacement of women's gendered and subjective traumatic experiences" 259
Hamda's memories of pre-Nakba Palestine emerge as a network of entangled and overlapped fragments" 61
"The ongoing actuality of Palestinian tragedy entails not only the impossibility of curing trauma by narrating or forgetting, but also effacement of women's gendered and subjective traumatic experiences" 259
May 20, 2024
Excellent read if you’re trying to understand Palestine.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews